Mare Somniorum

It’s been a while since I last saw “The Fog of War”.  For those of us too young to actually have experienced the “cold war” there are endless ways to be told about the time in question.  Few however have hit me as deeply as “The Fog of War”.  Robert S. McNamara was in his mid eighties during the course of the interviews that, in essence, is this documentary.  It is a compelling story of a man who’s been there, done that and had to live with those actions. In “The Fog of War” we are presented with 11 lessons from his life and they’re hard to brush aside as “just words” when McNamara talks.

A lot of people have their own perception of the man Robert Strange McNamara.  No matter the perception, this will shed light over it. When you see him as an old man, and realize he could give any orator a run for his money, you can’t help wonder how he must have been in his prime. No wonder he could polarize a room by entering it.

Anyway, it’s not a history lesson. It’s one mans subjective take on 80-odd years of experience. It’s one mans subjective understanding of people, nations and their relationships. It’s one mans subjective take on wars and their consequences. With that being said, McNamara is an amazing man to listen to. When you couple this with taped recordings between of him advising the presidents he served under, you just blink a few times. When Lyndon B. Johnson says explicitly that he wants to “kill some of them” with regards to Vietnam there is a pause before McNamara replies that he’ll see what he can produce to achieve that goal.

And McNamara makes few excuses. He tries, mostly with great success, to explain why certain choices were made. One of the lessons is that “Rationality will not save us”, rational leaders both in Kremlin and in Washington tried to avoid war over Cuba, but the lack of information available to both sides made talking difficult to say the least. Or as a line given to McNamara in the movie “Thirteen Days” goes with regards to the blockade “This is not a blockade. This is language. A new vocabulary, the likes of which the world has never seen! This is President Kennedy communicating with Secretary Khrushchev!”

He might not have said those words in real life, but after watching “The Fog of War”, you imagine he just might have said just that. The lessons are hard, and painful, and as he says, he tries to learn from his mistakes, we all do. You repeat them a few times and then learn. But he also says that there will be no learning with nuclear weapons, we make one mistake and we obliterate nations. This, as he said, is what they were trying to avoid.

Considering all the flak he’s taken over the decades I was also surprised at McNamaras ability to talk about fairly sensitive issues without much anger. We see him fight tears and smile, even laugh, we see him somewhat agitated, but we never see him upset or angry at anything said to him, if anything, he’s angry with the lack of human learning, his own included. It is truly an amazing journey into a mans mind and it is a gift to us all that Errol Morris shot the movie.

During the interview, McNamara wishes to highlight the following for us, and I thought I’d pass it along:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Elliot, “Little Gidding”

I think I’ve called Egan “interesting to read” or something like that on more than one occasion.  “Schild’s Ladder” is interesting, no doubt, but if one ever found either Diaspora or Permutation City to be daunting reads, this isn’t even literature.   “Schild’s Ladder” is full of conceptual ideas and models down to a point where the story, even it’s intent, is caught up in it.  When you name a piece of literature after what Wikipedia describes as “a method for parallel-transporting a vector along a curve using only geodesics“, you know why people learned to duck and cover once upon a time.  I suppose a lot of people will be happy that it’s all over in under 300 pages,  and to be honest, I’m probably one of them.

The opening paragraph sets the standard:

In the beginning was a graph, more like diamond than graphite. Every node in this graph was tetravalent: connected by four edges to four other nodes. By a count of edges, the shortest path from any node back to itself was a loop six edges long. Every node belonged to twenty-four such loops, as well as forty-eight loops eight edges long, and four hundred eighty that were ten edges long. The edges had no length or shape, the nodes no position; the graph consisted only of the fact that some nodes were connected to others. This pattern of connections, repeated endlessly, was all there was.

I’m not going to say it’s easy to follow the ideas without wrestling with the science involved.  It honestly isn’t.  The reader is forced to comprehend context to be able to follow the message from Egan, and that context is unequivocally tied to the science.  You don’t have to be able to hold (or even follow) a lecture in quantum graph theory, but I’d put money on that knowledge making the content easier to follow.  At some point you realize that you can only battle so many things at once while reading fiction.

That being said, we’re again moving into the realm of identity.  We always are with Egan, but this time we’re dealing with it more on the level on consciousness and the journey of the self, rather than defining the entity we see as the I itself.  To this end we run into constructs that bend time, space and probably the idea of free will into concepts that bear little resemblance to even most philosophical debates you’d run into.

“Schild’s Ladder” is as hard as Egan gets.  It may cause his ideas to be harder to follow, but it also gives them a lot more of a foundation to work on.  Other books probably serve as a better introduction to Egan, but once you pop, you just can’t stop.  Read it.  With patience and without worry about time it takes.  Besides, time is just another facet of the flipping the pages.

“Rome, the first thousand years” by Indro Montanelli is a relaxed walk through the first millennium of the Roman empire.  Montanelli chose this informal and relaxed tone in an attempt to make the content approchable and entertaining and he’s mostly (delightfully) successful.  The tone makes the people we meet in the work come alive as faceted indivuduals to a much greater extent than what is often seen from historical works, and it does indeed help in captivating the audience.

However, capturing a thousand years of Rome in 371 pages is no easy feat and in this respect Montanelli only partially succeeds.  Portions of the book essentially becomes a list of names and their relationships, sometimes with very little meat on the bone to tie much of anything to the names themselves to.  This isn’t really a failing of the author though, considering the material he pretty much pulls off what he can with it.

The last quarter of the book, dealing with the new faith and the disintegration of the empire shows most of these issues quite clearly, while also to some extent showing that the book was written in 1957.   This shouldn’t be seen as a deterrant from reading the book though — if history is of interest.  Rome has never been so lively and relaxed, and at times, funny, as it is here.